


Happy New Year

by benvoliio



Category: Romeo And Juliet - Shakespeare
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Angst/Comfort, Grief/Mourning, Suicide Attempt, happy-ish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-12
Updated: 2018-11-12
Packaged: 2019-08-22 15:18:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16600460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/benvoliio/pseuds/benvoliio
Summary: Modern AU where Montagues & Capulets own/live in competing apartment buildings. Everyone in the younger generation is (or would be) roughly college-aged. This is Benvolio dealing with the first new year after the events of the play. There aren't really any specific ships tied to this but feel free to read whatever into it!This ended up getting kind of dark accidentally (sorry), so warnings for grief/mourning and a pretty heavily implied suicide attempt. It does end on a somewhat positive note, though.





	Happy New Year

Benvolio awoke with a start, the cheers from the apartment next door rousing him from his indistinct and shadowy dreams to an equally blurry and dim reality. Blinking heavily, he reached for his glasses on the bedside table and turned on his lamp. Next door continued to chatter noisily, the muffled sounds of celebration reminding him of the date and occasion. He pulled his phone towards him and checked the time. Six minutes to midnight. December 31st. No missed messages. He stared blankly at the screen until it turned off of its own accord, retained that position for a few pointless seconds, then sighed and swung his legs over the edge of the bed. May as well do the countdown. He was awake anyway.

Leaving the soft, warm light of his room he stopped for a moment in the dark living room to let his eyes adjust. The evidence of a hasty renovation was apparent, the moonlight created miniature crescents on the circular tops of paint cans scattered on the floor, and the white sheet in place of a window that had yet to arrive tugged gently against the haphazard stacks of books holding it down. His furniture and library-caliber shelves were covered in dusty plastic, the bright fabric and colourful, well-creased spines veiled and ghostly in the dim light.

Wandering through to the kitchen he fumbled around in the refrigerator— the light had become temperamental a month prior— and emerged with a bottle of champagne. The foil was partially unwrapped, but the bottle otherwise untouched. He dragged a chair from the kitchen table over to the side of the counter and clambered up to the upper cupboards to grab a glass. Reaching up, something nondescript tugged at his memory, but he brushed it aside almost without acknowledgment. Glass in hand, he descended carefully and nudged the chair back into place.

A chilled draft caught his attention, and he retired back to the living room with his glass of champagne. The wind picked up and the draft grew stronger, the sheet over the hole in his wall fluttering in a semblance of life. He freed one corner from its literary weight and pulled it to the side. Shivering, he stood for a moment looking over the lights of the city below. The brightly glowing clock a few blocks over told him there were three minutes left of this year. Three minutes left of three hundred and sixty-five days wholly and completely different from any others he had ever experienced.

He sat down on the part of the wall that should have been a windowsill and brought his feet over to rest on the bars of the decorative balcony. It wasn’t completely accurate to say that each of the past three hundred and sixty-five days had been unlike any before. The year had started out simple enough, after all. A car passed below his feet and the whisper of a memory returned, a ghostly presence rattling around the walls of his mind. He took off his glasses and let the city melt into smudges of light. This time last year they had spent New Year’s Eve as they usually did: gathered in one of their apartments, ignoring their winter assignments for an evening, drinking mulled wine or cheap champagne and playing board games until the countdown began. Sometimes one of them would arrive late, having been invited to this party or that. Sometimes they would attend as a group, for a while, but always they would return to the Montague apartment complex to see the year off.

Benvolio turned his head instinctively as a stranger’s laughter rang out sharply from the general clamour next door. For a moment, it had almost sounded familiar. He closed his eyes and the laughter struck an image of someone’s face across his eyelids. He opened them to find the world blurrier than he had left it. Brushing his cheeks dry apathetically, he returned his glasses to his nose and squinted at his phone. Two minutes. Two months after New Year’s last year, Romeo had encountered a Capulet girl, Rosaline, at a student writers society meeting. By mid-March, he was head over heels for her. By May, rejected and pining. This wasn’t particularly unusual, Romeo had a fiery and passionate spirit, and tended to love quickly and deeply. For months Benvolio had tried to rouse him from his lovesick despondency, seemingly without success. Then, late that summer, an opportunity had presented itself. Mercutio had been invited to a party—

Something inside him twisted painfully, stabbing through his haze of detachment. Mercutio’s ghostly laughter rang out again in the night. He hadn’t wanted to spend New Year’s reliving the past. He hadn’t wanted to spend New Year’s, or any time, reminiscing anything at all. He had planned to be grateful, thankful that he was here to see another year arrive in Verona. This was supposed to be a new page, a way to compartmentalize the chapters of his life. His face crumpled like a sheet of paper. The truncated scribblings of a manuscript full of lost potential tossed unceremoniously into the wastebasket.

Calls marking one minute filled the air, and Benvolio’s composure broke, adding to the cacophony with shouts that nobody heard. He wasn’t  _ ready _ , this year had taken  _ everything _ from him and he wasn’t ready to let go, he was supposed to move on, why couldn’t he just get it through his useless skull that they were gone but Verona was changed, the feud was over, it had all been worth it! Had it all been worth it? Not to him. Not for him.

He impulsively knocked his glass off of its place on the wall beside him and watched as it tumbled towards the street, already regretting his action. As it smashed onto the pavement the countdown began, voices calling out from all around him. He just sat and stared downwards as the seconds slipped away, incomprehensibly fixated on the glittering remains, mourning the champagne that he had barely even tasted.

_ Nine! _

He could hear them now, his friends, his family, his supposed enemies, now laughing together, now sparring bitter words as sharp as breaking glass.

_ Eight! _

He could see them, too, if he tried.

_ Seven! _

Lady Montague, mother in all but blood. Paris, almost a stranger, but polite and well-intentioned.

_ Six! _

Tybalt, angry and vitriolic but fiercely protective of those that he loved. Romeo and Juliet, both young, both searingly intelligent, both infinitely deserving of each other.

_ Five! _

Mercutio.

_ Four! _

All of them fallen, dashed to pieces, shattered like a champagne glass thrown from the fifth story.

_ Three! _

It was still down there, the glass.

_ Two! _

He stood up.

_ One! _

“Ben!”

A hand grabbed his arm, pulling him backwards into the living room. His glasses slipped from his face and the sheet came loose from the tape fixing it to the wall, settling over him and the owner of the familiar voice like a shroud. Enveloped in white and a barrage of cheering, Benvolio sobbed into a shirt that smelled like home, cradled in arms that he hadn’t known in months.

“Mercutio…!” he gasped, though he knew, even without his glasses in the dim light and through the noises of celebration, that the face was wrong and the voice wasn’t quite the same.

“Benvolio, I’m sorry, it’s me, it’s Valentine. It’s okay. Ben, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Valentine was crying, too, and they remained on the apartment floor long after the cheers faded back into the background sounds of the city. Eventually, Valentine pulled the sheet off, wiping his nose.

“Are you… Are you alright?” His voice shook.

Benvolio only looked at him.

“I was with my uncle, but I couldn’t— I couldn’t stay, everyone was celebrating and I just— I just— So I thought of you, because— because you love him too and— I thought— I thought you— we—”

“Thank you.” Benvolio’s voice was quiet. “I’m sorry I scared you. Val, I almost— on top of losing your brother… I don’t know, I should have thought…I’m so sorry, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Thank you.”

Valentine met his gaze, eyes welling up again.

“Ben, you’re  _ grieving _ .”

“I know, I know, but what if I’d just been a little bit of a better person, I could’ve stopped it, what if I could’ve saved them—”  Benvolio choked, “I feel like it’s all my fault which is so— so stupid! But these last few months— Christmas was awful! I keep feeling like I’m going to see them all again, it doesn’t feel like they’re gone, like he’s really gone— I just, I just miss him! Give him back! I just want him back! I want him back!”

“It’s not your fault! It’s not your fault!” Valentine threw his arms around him.

“But it’s not fair… it hurts so much and I don’t want to  _ feel _ this anymore!”

“Ben, Benvolio,” Valentine murmured thickly, “You don’t have to feel it alone, I want him back, too. I miss him. I’m here.”

There was a long pause as Benvolio’s breath hitched and he let himself shake in Valentine’s embrace.

“I don’t know if it’ll ever get easier,” Benvolio whispered through tears. “I don’t know if I can do it.”

“I don’t know if I can, either. But I’m willing to try, if you are.”

Benvolio took a wobbly breath.

“I think… I think so.”

“You know,” Valentine smiled wetly, “He’s probably so touched right now. I don’t think anyone’s cried this much for him since he fell off that bike and cracked his skull on the curb when I was five.”

Benvolio let out a half laugh, half sob.

“That was mostly Romeo.”

“Yeah. Mercutio told him afterward that his brain had seeped out and fried on the pavement like an egg. And he believed it. He cried about Mercutio’s poor lost brain for a week.”

“Always a flair for the dramatic.”

“Of course.”

“Valentine?”

He sat back and put his glasses back on.

“Thank you, again.”

Valentine smiled in response.

“Do you want some champagne? I don’t think I can go to bed just yet.”

“I’d rather not go home yet, either. Champagne sounds perfect.” Valentine replied. “Happy New Year, and all that.”

“New year,” Benvolio smiled tentatively, “the happy part is a work in progress.”

“New year.” Valentine agreed.

New year. Not any different, really, from the one that had just ended twenty minutes ago, but begun with a friend and the recognition that he was no longer alone in his grief. Maybe that was enough.


End file.
